Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to enterprise computing systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for automatically identifying components to monitor in an enterprise environment.
Related Art
Many organizations rely extensively on enterprise applications to manage and store critical information. Often, these applications are distributed across multiple servers, databases, and appliances. This distributed framework provides for greater flexibility, performance, and redundancy, but at the same time increases the complexity of monitoring the entire system to avoid costly downtime.
In order to monitor distributed enterprise applications, organizations often use sophisticated monitoring systems that query the status of each individual piece of these applications. However, in order to do so, these monitoring systems require extensive configuration specifying each piece of the distributed enterprise application that needs to be monitored. In many cases, the administrator that is responsible for configuring the monitoring system and performing the monitoring duties is not as intimately aware of all of the pieces of these applications as the application programmers. Thus, it is easy for some critical pieces of these applications to be overlooked as the monitoring system is configured.
In many organizations, distributed enterprise applications are constantly evolving. Software upgrades and patches are regularly applied, hardware is regularly upgraded, and different software modules are regularly added and removed. Many times, these changes are not communicated back to the administrator that is responsible for monitoring these applications, and the monitoring system is not updated to reflect these changes.
Hence, what is needed is a method for monitoring distributed enterprise applications without the problems described above.